In the winter of 2014, I wanted to try my hand at shooting a beauty editorial. With an awesome team of hair and makeup artists assembled, I decided to go big, and asked 6 killer models to be a part of the shoot. Once I was at the shoot location, with three hairstylists, two makeup artists, and six models, I began to feel a bit of pressure (it was my first beauty shoot, after all).

Without a ton of lighting experience, I was a bit nervous about getting everything just right, and I had decided that I would get the lighting perfect on one model and just keep the setup for the other five. I had the lighting near perfect when I adjusted the position of one light, completely messing up my previous setup. I couldn't get the lighting back to where it had been, and I started to have a bit of an internal freak out. The model that had been sitting for my lighting tests soon moved to the makeup chair, and when another model took her place for the light tests, I saw that the previous lighting looked completely different on her due to her different height, hair and skin color, etc.

This was my moment of liberation.

Instead of trying to achieve some kind of perfection for the whole shoot, I realized that no such thing existed, and that I would just trust my own instincts and understanding of light to make each model look awesome. From that point on, the shoot was a blast, with singing, dancing, laughing, etc. Everyone was having a great time, and I'm thrilled with how the images turned out (this was also my first time retouching photos for an editorial, so I'm especially happy with how the final edits turned out). The next step was submitting the editorial for publication, which is usually a bit nerve wracking, but we got lucky and were picked up by Gilded Magazine almost immediately, with a gorgeous spread commemorating our wild, beautiful shoot.